Jan 2024 - Hermit, Hibernate and Build Something
January is too cold and dark so best spent hibernating and hermitting and building something. I spent the month mostly obsessed with programming my new watch.
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse
PineTime
I dunno why people find January depressing. Perhaps they try going outside or something. That would be mistake. Seems to me to be the month to stay home, hermit and hibernate, and make something.
I am fully engrossed here, have been all month. Barely time for anything else. Loving it.
This is also why all my domain-name renewals come up in January.
When I first got this new Pine-Time “open-source” watch, I was very underwhelmed.
Apparently I was indeed already achieving about right goal of steps and have around the right heart-rate.
Couldn’t really see myself wearing it long-term. Not really a watch guy. Didn’t wear ’em even before I was carrying a phone everywhere.
But when I put the Python firmware on it and started actually programming it myself I fell for the thing entirely.
That’s the power of hackability I guess.
Micropython is really interesting. Haven’t felt this memory-constrained since I was writing software for 8-bit home computers. I have become extravagant in my use of large buffers and just reading in whole files all at once from programming servers all the time. It’s nostalgic being back to trying to eek out each byte and resuse all the variables and refactor code so it’ll fit in RAM.
Here’s the surprising thing: every variable in Python is like 28 bytes of RAM.
You think you’re just storing a switch that turns a thing on and off, a 0 or a 1. A bool.
But no. You’re storing a Bool object, which has a type and a reference-count and overhead to represent it’s structure.
Which means the most RAM-saving thing I’ve been able to do is basically replace all the variables with pointers into a byte-array.
Like back when programming the old Dos machines: basically just allocate your memory block and organize it yourself.
Fight the OS. Fight the Micropython.
It wants to turn your flag bits into 28 byte macro objects.
I may yet end up pushing multiple flags into one byte.
This machine only has 32k and the system takes up 2 thirds of it.
I’m used to optimizing for throughput and latency, so this micro-environment where I’m happy to waste a few cycles to spare the bytes is a really different type of challenge.
Way more like the old Spectrum days.
Here’s a long blog post about the software I wrote and how you can install it on your watch if you have one.
life
I did venture out of the house a couple of times.
Basic Lee
Went to see Stuart Lee at the Leicester Square theatre. He’s fun and funny and dissecting his own comedy in front of your very eyes.
Felt like I’d heard it before quite a lot. Maybe should leave it more than a year before next time.
You sometimes see other comics copying the way Lee disparages his own audience explaining why some got the joke and others didn’t.
He does that great, and continues to be hilarious, but the rest of y’all should stop doing that.
Everything I said to my friends during the break about how if you refine your audience constantly and narrow it down to just the devoted, you end up with an audience consisting of people just like you, he repeated only funnier in the second half.
Still love Stew. Great stuff.
Deeviate
When you’re over 50 it’s fine to just go to the disco that started at 3pm and then head home at 10.
Cheaper that way, the youngsters can take over the venue before midnight and we can go to bed.
The Egg used to have an entrance on York Way, but it turns out it no longer does. So I walked up and down York Way lost in thought not noticing it not being there a couple of times before I found the side-street you have to use now.
The outside/smoking deck they have built is one of the best in London.
They got your top deck, and stairs down to the middle deck that has a roof and a pizza restaurant.
Security is insane now though. Full on metal-detector, pockets-emptying, pat-down, stare-into-the-camera, present-your-photo-id.
It was a nice night, I danced and chatted, spent time with old friends and made connections with new.
Exposed bugs in my self-programmed watch step-counter, which only show up after 15k steps.
Excellent crowd there, Deev and Ben have an awesome crew.
Internet Enshitification
The internet and tech continue to get worse.
Google are going to feed your messages to AI and have it piping up like a neoclippy trying to tell you what to think.
FFS.
Asked for a recommend on an android sms app.
And Nitter finally closed down:
So farewell then Nitter,
You were useful as a way to read someone’s microblog as Twitter ruined all it’s own ways to do so.
But it was inevitable that they would kill you for it in the end.
Now I guess I just won’t know what those few people are saying.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
Had all of January off obsessed with watch-programming but here’s the first Tarot show of the year from Feb: Should we take the kid’s phones away?
Reading
I read “Being You” by neuroscientist Anil Seth, a book about what consciousness is and how it comes about.
A much more likely story than the previous best book I read on the subject, Dannet’s Consciousness Explained.
The theory is something like brains doing Bayesian modelling and predicting, conscious actions are the brain predicting what it will itself do.
It is now the book I’d recommend for anyone asking what consciousness is and not wanting religious woo in answer.
Watching
Been watching season seven of Rick And Morty the first one with new actors doing the lead voices.
Doubt I’d have even noticed if I wasn’t paying attention.
Sounds sort of cleaner.
Episode four was well vicious on meat-eaters.
Links
Some really great entries to the B3ta photoshop challenge this week, “puppet art gallery”
Depression
Scott wonders why depressed people like sad songs:
" Just to hammer in the analogy to fevers: In a fever, you are dangerously warm, but instead of trying to cool down, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even warmer.
In anorexia, you are dangerously thin, but instead of trying to gain weight, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even thinner.
Now let’s take it all the way: In depression, you are dangerously sad, but instead of trying to cheer up, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even sadder. "
Internet
Search is shit now, and all the websites are the same and they’re all full of junk.
The Verge tells us why, in a nicely animated story about Search Engine Optimization.
Hugos at Wordcon
Charles Stross explains what happened to sci-fi convention WorldCon this year, and the Hugo Awards that happens there. He reckons the Chinese sfi-fi fan amateur organizers didn’t really expect the government to get heavy with them and panicked to fix the results.
Simulation
Scott Aaronson has some interesting thoughts on the computability of physics and whether we’re living in a simulation. Wow at this sentence: " even if it turns out that lattice methods can’t properly simulate the Standard Model, that tells us little about whether any computational methods could simulate the ultimate quantum theory of gravity. A priori, the latter task might be harder than “merely” simulating the Standard Model (if, e.g., Roger Penrose’s microtubule theory turned out to be right), but it might also be easier (e.g., because of the finiteness of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, and perhaps the Hilbert space dimension, of any bounded region of space). "
Learn from video
Robert Sapolsky is really funny and sharp and entertaining talking to Canover about free-will but he apparently doesn’t deserve the credit for it and had no choice in the matter.
If you like Cory Doctorow describing why the internet is all enshitified these days but prefer it as a 60 minute talk instead of an essay then this is for you!
He did just that at the Marshall McLuhan Lecture in Germany.
I multiply vectors all the time of course. Well, instruct my machines to do it and that works if I try enough combinations.
That’s mostly a cross product I think but I mostly don’t have to think about why it works, I just try the combinations all day until it does.
This talk explaining why multiplying vectors is so confusing was good though.
Captain Disillusion explains camera shutters. He’s always great.
more
That’s just the highlights this month, there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed
Around the Fediverse
I remember when the cutting-edge new-exploration of the internet was Usenet, and then the web came and the forums sprang up and the blogs and then the cutting-edge moved to the big corporate sites and then IT STOPPED.
The big corporate sites became so rich that as soon as anything else started up they would just buy it and either shutter it or cripple it or load all their spyware malvertising all over it.
The new leading-edge can’t be a private corporation, if you get any traction they will just buy you. Getting away from exactly that is the problem.
Where’s the cutting edge now? Does anyone think it’s at Facebook’s companies? Really? Or a Twitter that can just be bought? Does anyone really think the corporations will revolutionize and save the internet?
Not a chance, that’s up to us. Here’s some Fediverse highlights.
Gargon points at a Fedivers explainer video:
" Excellent video by @Techaltar about the #SocialWeb. You can basically send this to anyone who wants to learn what makes Mastodon unique compared to other social media platforms and what it is that we’re doing here 🙂
"Lrhodes lamenting journalists giving up their own power: " A lot of journalism outlets made themselves more dependent on social platforms than they needed to be when they stopped relying on open, independent syndication in the form of RSS or ATOM. Many essentially gave up on distributing notifications on their own on the premise that Twitter or Facebook or a hosted newsletter was better, which gave those news orgs a vested interested in companies that never reliably had the needs of the Fourth Estate at heart. "
“Decentered” is a new podcast about Fediverse. He’s episode one:
" Sean stayed up extra late, to ensure the official launch of our new #fediverse podcast, Decentered, would happen before he went to sleep. Check out the very first episode! More to come. 👀 https://wedistribute.org/podcast/decentered-s1e1-creation-and-discovery/ "
A while ago I started to wonder why “bicubic” image filter inside #blender is exactly like that. And that led into a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what apps mean by “cubic”/“bicubic”, and of course everyone means a different thing.So I made a small html page to compare them! https://aras-p.info/img/misc/upsample_filter_comp_2024/
Rob Manuel has a live show from Fesshole:
" Do come to @fesshole Live coz it’s more interesting to do stuff than it is to sit around at home. That’s the hard sell. https://sites.google.com/view/fesshole "
A blog post from Snarfed. He’s writing a activitypub bridge from RSS/Indieweb so his posts look different to most. Here he describes his attitude towards moderation on the open internet.
As google cancel their web-cache, CiferecaNinjo tells us why it was so essential:
" Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem: Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible. I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face. "